Welcome to the TradeVine whose purpose is to encourage the entertainment industry to read their trades: Variety, Backstage, Hollywood Reporter, etc. Enjoy learning about your industry.

Each Friday, The TradeVine seeks out a few of the informative trade articles you may have missed. Please visit the trade, itself, for the entire article.

Backstage – 5 Things You Can Do to Further Your Career During the Holidays, By Kate McClanaghan
It’s started already. That feeling of being torn between embracing the best of the holidays and wishing they were over so you can get on with maintaining the momentum in your career that’s taken you all year to develop.

Rest assured, there’s plenty you can do to keep the ball in play to further your career during the holidays. Here are a few options.

1. Promote yourself.
It’s one of the best-kept secrets in the industry, but this is one of the best times of year to score new representation. Talent agencies aren’t quite as busy with auditions between Thanksgiving and New Year’s as they are the rest of the year. Which is why, traditionally, agents reassess their talent roster right about now by rotating out talent that may not have added to the agency’s reputation in the past year or so. Agents often take this time of year to consider new blood for the coming year and update their talent roster. It’ll be too chaotic to do so when they’re up to their necks in work in the coming months. Read Entire Article Here

The Hollywood Reporter – Netflix Sets Kids Animated Series Based on Japanese Folklore, Rick Porter
‘Oni’ comes from Oscar-nominated filmmaker Dice Tsutsumi.
Netflix is adding to its roster of animated series for kids and families.

The streamer has ordered Oni, a show inspired by Japanese folklore. The series comes from creator and showrunner Daisuke “Dice” Tsutsumi and Tonko House, the team behind the Oscar-nominated animated short The Dam Keeper.
“Having spent my entire career in the American animation industry, part of me always wondered if there would ever be a place in the stories I tell for the other half of my identity, as a Japanese native,” said Tsutsumi. “This Tonko House collaboration with Netflix is perhaps a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for me to freely embrace my unique background to share with the rest of the world the wonderful stories I grew up with in Japan, particularly ones I believe are timely to the society we live in today.”

Oni is set in a world filled with the oddball gods and monsters of Japanese mythology. Onari, the free-spirited daughter of one creature, is determined to follow in the footsteps of the heroes of yore, but her unique powers are yet to be revealed. She will discover if she has what it takes to protect her peaceful village from the encroaching presence of the mysterious “Oni” who threaten the gods. Read Entire Article Here

Variety – How the ‘Frozen’ Music Team Helped Move the Story Forward in Disney’s Sequel, By Jon Burlingame
With Disney’s 2013 “Frozen” ranking as the highest-grossing animated film of all time and its Oscar-winning song “Let It Go” now an iconic empowerment anthem, how can the filmmakers and songwriters, reunited for “Frozen 2,” top the tale of sisters Elsa and Anna?

“It was all about wanting to tell more of the story,” explains co-director Chris Buck. “We felt like the first one hadn’t quite ended. We let the characters guide us as to what their journeys would be.” Co-director and writer Jennifer Lee adds, “We all committed to telling it the same way, working on the story and integrating music in a way that drives the story forward.”

Their partners in storytelling were songwriters Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez, who penned “Let It Go” and are on their fourth “Frozen” project (including the animated short “Frozen Fever” and the 2018 Broadway musical). Daily story conferences with their tunesmith collaborators began four years ago, Lee says, and the new songs began taking shape in 2017. Read Entire Article Here

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